Oliver Foote

How to Get Started in Real Estate Investing or Flipping

People have been buying run down and dilapidated things, then fixing them up and reselling them for a profit for as long as there have been things that break. It has now taken on a style of it’s own when it comes to real estate. Some people might argue that flippers are just investors who take away supply from other potential buyers. But I can tell you from experience, that the majority of people who are in a position to buy a home they plan to live in prefer to have the home at least 90% complete and up to their standards before they move into it. The people who are ok with a home that requires a ton of work, or has been used as a hoarder home, or is a century home that’s half falling apart, are almost exclusively investors who are then competing with other investors. I think that investors and home flippers are doing a service by purchasing homes that no one else is willing to go near, then turning them into something that is liveable and will appeal to the mass market. If they make some money along the way, more power to them. Capitalism at work. Obviously, it has become clear that relying solely on the private market to manage the housing of an entire country is not the most ideal strategy, there are flaws in every system. That’s a discussion for another day.

For todays discussion I’ll focus on how flipping homes works and some things to consider if this sounds interesting to you. Firstly, you need to have a reasonable level of confidence in your abilities or your contractors abilities if you go the route of purchasing a run down home. With home prices where they are now in Toronto and the surrounding area, even a very poorly maintained home can fetch an absurd price because of the land value and other factors. If the move-in ready home is “only” 100,000 more, most people find it a very reasonable trade-off to pay a tad bit more and avoid the hassle of renovations. That leaves a select few people who are willing to pay the high price and take on the risk of doing renovations with the hope of possibly making some money on the sale. Over time as more and more people have learned about home flipping and the real estate market becomes more efficient, the “gaps” in the market become smaller and smaller which makes it more difficult to make a profit as an investor. You pile on a serious supply demand imbalance due to population and other factors and you find yourself in a bizarre situation where people will pay a premium just to simply get ANY home, regardless of condition. This is not an ideal market dynamic in my opinion for investors or end users.

When is a good time to flip homes?

People say that you can’t time the market, while there is some truth to this, I believe that you can absolutely make educated guesses about where the market will likely be headed. Let’s take a look at some recent examples. If you were considering flipping homes from 2020 to 2022 it would have been a good time to do so because the Bank of Canada cut interest rates at the fastest pace in recent history to prop up a potentially failing economy, and alongside the fed they effectively saved the stock market form complete collapse. This led to significant appreciation one year later. Real estate generally lags behind the stock market, and prices take a bit more time to move. But seeing the unprecedentedly low interest rates at which you could borrow money, locking in a 5-year fixed mortgage was a no brainer at the time. Even if your renovation took 1-2 years, with money being so unbelievably cheap, and so few people willing to put their homes on the market, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how that equation would lead to increasing prices. After the development of a vaccine it provided people with the confidence they needed to be around others again and provided a visible pathway to the end of the pandemic. Around this time in late 2020 early 2021 all the stars were really aligning and they were pointing at the fact that the real estate market was going to get a little bit crazy.

Not every shockwave of the pandemic lockdowns could have been predicted. For example, tradespeople became very challenging to find, and this made home renovation projects more expensive and extended their timelines quite a lot. This is where having some backup plans for any risky investment is always a good idea. In the case of the covid real estate market, being willing to do some of the work yourself would have been a very useful backup plan if you were a home flipper as well as planning ahead and being flexible with the materials you used, since it was nearly impossible to find certain items in stores. A good majority of home renovations can be done DIY with YouTube and a small time investment you can learn how to do pretty much anything nowadays. I would only recommend the DIY strategy if you are willing to put a significant time investment into the home, and have some amount of prior experience, because even though it might be quick to learn it can take a lot of time to complete. It’s also important to factor in the carrying costs into your profitability equation and to budget at least 1.5x the amount of time you think it will take you to finish a project, and even then expect it might take longer than that. Hofstadter’s law states that a project always takes longer than expected, even when the law is taken into account. The best way to ensure that you come out ahead is to use a very conservative equation to manage your costs while also baking in some profit as a buffer.

Purchasing in a depreciating market on the other hand can lead to losing money on the renovation, which is why I like to recommend investors have multiple workable strategies for each investment. You can actually come out ahead by making an educated guess during a falling market as to where you think the bottom or near bottom might be. If you take this approach you need to have multiple strategies and be willing to weather a storm if it turns out you were wrong. If you were banking on the appreciating to get you out of a flip profitability and it doesn’t happen there are a few other options. For example you could turn the property into a long-term or short-term rental, you could get creative with the renovation by including a basement suite to turn the property into two units instead of one, which generally increases your potential rent and final sale price. If you do use the rental method as a backup, it’s important to understand that you will likely be leaving equity in the property which might prevent you from doing another deal in the short term and you also have to be ok with the risks and responsibilities of being a landlord. Making sure that a property has multiple workable strategies is very important to prevent you from completely losing your shirt, especially if it’s your first investment and if you’re unsure what the market will do in the short to medium term. It is also important to actively try and avoid risk. With the amount of information out there today it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that eventually the gravy train of appreciation in 2021 was going to come to an end. The actual end date was up for discussion at the time and I think many people assumed the fed and BoC would increase rates sooner than they actually did. This is where being cautious comes into play. It can be hard to think clearly when you get swept up in the FOMO of real estate news stories talking about people making crazy amounts of money. Getting swept up in the hype and not understanding your own risk tolerance (i.e. how you’ll feel deep down if you happen to lose the majority or all of your investment) is often what leads people to making mistakes and losing money. Ensuring that you are thinking clearly, understanding your own tolerance for risk (there’s nothing wrong with the slow and steady approach), and making sure than an investment will work on multiple levels are all great ways to hedge your bets as an investor.

What does the flipping market look like today?

In our current market there are still opportunities to renovate homes and be profitable, you just have to be more certain about your purchase + improvements price than maybe you needed to be in 2020. I’d consider our current market stable with respect to prices and appreciation. The next move from the Bank of Canada is largely anticipated to be an interest rate cut. So if you buy today I would say there is a reasonable probability that interest rates are lower a year from now which means that prices at the very least are likely to stay stable and more likely to appreciate a small amount from today. Don’t expect anything crazy, but if you buy at a great price there is still room out there to make money as an investor. I would say the biggest difference in this market is that carrying costs have increase significantly thanks to the increased mortgage rates. This means that if your project goes over time, it can cause a significant dent in your profitability. So I would highly recommend being even more conservative with timelines or baking in a higher percentage of profitability to make sure that you still come out ahead.

Many professional investors use various marketing strategies to find off-market properties to purchase (i.e. properties that are not listed on the MLS). A common one is sending out mail to houses in a particular area and offering a quick closing to a distressed home owner. There are companies out there who “wholesale” homes. Basically signing a contract with someone with the option to assign the contract to another person, or even with the option to list their home on the MLS. Sometimes these companies will act unethically and a homeowner will sign something without understanding that there is an option to assign in the contract or that this person will be listing their home and doing showings. Without saying too much on this topic, I want to make it clear that I find this approach to business deplorable. Honesty is extremely important with whoever you are doing business with even if that is the only time you will do business with that person. Your reputation is everything, so if you promise a potential homeowner something the expectation is that you follow through with the promise. There are people who wholesale homes and run their business in a very honest and upfront fashion, I have absolutely no problem with that if the homeowner knows all the facts and decides that is their best option. As a homeowner it is important that you read the contract you are signing, and ask around your network for a trusted lawyer to look at the contract if you are doing an off market transaction. To be blunt a big reason people end up working with Realtors is because it is their full-time job to make sure they have your back, and if they mess up you have someone to blame (and sue). But if you’re doing everything yourself you don’t have the level of regulation, expertise, or insurance that Realtors have in order to protect consumers when dealing with what is usually their largest asset. Of course you can just as well come across an unethical Realtor who is only looking out for themselves and does a poor job looking out for you. But at the very least you have some amount of recourse and consumer protections when working with them.

That was a bit of a tangent so let me wrap up here by discussing how to increase the chances of an investment working out. As I mentioned above, trying to find off market deals can be a serious win when it comes to purchasing a property at a great price. There are a myriad of strategies to find people who are willing to sell, whether that’s flyers, door hangers, door knocking and pitching your proposition to them, online marketing methods, networking with friends, family and co-workers. You do have to be somewhat cautious if/when you do find someone willing to sell and I would recommend asking the homeowners if they would be opposed to a home inspection or at the very least doing an inspection yourself. Sometimes the homeowner might be willing to sell you the home, but doesn’t want to have strangers coming through their home. This does make it a bit more challenging from the investors perspective and if you choose to go through with a purchase you have to be ready for pretty much any problem on the books since you couldn’t get an inspector in to see the property. Depending on how many properties you’ve invested in before or how much experience you have with home building or home inspection you may have enough personal expertise or a friend whom you really trust that can give you a reasonable idea of the condition of the home and if it’s worth offering something to the homeowner.

This is again where risk tolerance comes in, making sure your profitability equation bakes in some of these risks, and preparing multiple viable strategies for the end use of the home (e.g. flip, rent, wholesale). You can find potential homes on the MLS to purchase as well, many investors are quite successful through simply purchasing homes that are on the market and negotiating a strategy that works for them. If you are looking for a deal on a publicly listed home here are some tips. First, look for homes that have been on the market for a long time or have been badly mispriced. Beyond 30-60 days is when sellers tend to realize they may have mispriced their home and this can open them up to negotiations.

Second, find out what the sellers situation is. This is where I would recommend getting a Realtor you trust and are willing to work with to call up the listing agent and try to get as much information as they can about the sellers reason for selling, urgency, and what types of things would make the seller more likely to accept an offer or what kinds of offers they might consider. For example, maybe they have to close by a certain date due to starting a new job. Maybe they will only sell if there is a firm cash offer and are just “testing the market” (these types are generally very hard to negotiate with, since they have no urgency and only care about getting their price). Maybe they are willing to consider a Seller-Financing mortgage at a lower rate than the banks can give you. This can serve as an annuity for the seller (e.g. monthly income) and allows you to give them the final higher price they are looking for since the financing could be cheaper than the banks offerings. You would have to coordinate with your agent and have them work with the listing agent to call up a lawyer and write up a contract for the seller to become a lender. The seller would likely be well advised to do some due diligence on your ability to pay the loan, as well as including the usual provisions in a mortgage such as the right to repossess the home if you default. This can be a challenge to pull off, but working with the right partners can make it a possibility. The seller might be ok with an extended closing which gives you time to find more funds or research development or rezoning opportunities that add more value to the property than a simple renovation thereby making the deal possible.

Lastly, the seller might even be willing to come in as a joint venture partner (if you have a proven track record) and allow you to renovate the home while retaining most of the equity and provide a 50/50 split on any profits made on the renovation and sale of the home beyond a certain price after factoring in costs. As you can see there are almost limitless ways to structure an investment that works for both the buyer and the seller, much of it depends on your risk tolerance, skill set, and your team. Which brings me to my final point, regardless of the approach you take it’s important to assemble a team of people that you trust in order to be successful in your investing endeavours, that includes people such as a real estate agent, mortgage broker, lawyer, home inspector, city planner, and various tradespeople that you trust. Having a strong team of advisors can make or break an investment, especially when dealing with one that has so many moving parts. I would highly recommend if you are thinking of getting into real estate as an investment and are considering any of the more complicated strategies that you find an investor who has done what you are thinking about doing and see if they are willing to spend some time talking with you about their experience. Research online, listen to investing podcasts, and most importantly just get started. You can easily overwhelm yourself with information and prepare until your eyes bleed out but nothing beats real world experience. Be prepared that it may not go completely as planned, start small with something just outside your comfort zone then build on your experiences and improve each time.

Hope that you found this information useful or interesting, feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on this topic. I’ll see you back here in two weeks with another post.

All the best,

Oliver Foote

Tax Benefits of Real Estate Investing

There are many tax benefits to real estate investing in Canada. The first and most obvious one is that you are not taxed on capital gains when you go to sell your primary residence. The idea is that a primary residence is not really an investment and can often cost a bunch more money than it makes you. So dollar for dollar you can move that money into a different home, minus realtor fees, lawyers, and land transfer tax (which don’t get me wrong, can add up). By contrast when you sell an investment property or stocks for that matter you will get hit with capital gains tax on 50% of the appreciation which gets added to your income and taxed at whatever brackets it fits into. This does not occur on your primary residence which is a very big advantage for people who are already in the property ladder and are either moving up or downsizing their home to fund their retirement. If you happen to have built up a good amount of home equity in your primary residence this can provide you with a significant amount of tax free money and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars on taxes in some cases.

Just because a primary residence is a very advantageous assets in term of tax benefits. Doesn’t mean you should discount the tax advantages of purchasing investment properties in the form of residential rentals or commercial properties. These have many similarities and differences. Depending on what type of property you want to manage you might prefer one over the other. You may want to speak with a tax accountant and a lawyer about the best corporate structures if you want to have a large portfolio of properties as they will be able to best advise you on your situation and how to make the most of the tax advantages. For now lets begin by discussing the tax advantages of investing in a regular residential investment up to 6 units (generally anything beyond 6 units is usually considered multi-family commercial). The first thing to understand is that the tax law views purchasing a rental property in a different way than purchasing a primary residence. The laws sees this as an investment with a profit motive, you can think of the investment home purchase almost as it’s own little business. Ideally it is making more money than it is costing the business to operate, or it is growing in value faster than the money you have to put into it to keep it afloat.

The first advantage to owning a rental property is something called depreciation. The CRA calls this CCA (Capital Cost Allowance). When you purchase an asset to run a business (a capital expense), you are allowed to depreciate it a certain percentage every year depending on which CCA class it falls into. The idea is that as you use the asset you bought to run your business, it wears and tears and may even require additional expenditures (such as paint, appliances or new wiring). All of these expenditures might be required to maintain the assets function to continue producing income for the business. However, over time the property will wear out beyond a useable state (this is more so the case with electronics and similar items, but the general idea still applies to rental properties for tax purposes). In this case the capital expense would be the cost of purchasing the home for the business. For typical residential rental properties the CRA allows a 4% depreciation rate per year (this varies depending on building uses etc). Depreciation can benefit you because it can be deducted from your rental income.

Similarly, you can deduct 100% of the interest portion of your monthly mortgage payments (ONLY the interest, not the loan principal you paid down). Loan interest on debt is seen as a cost of doing business. For example in a regular business the owner might take out a loan to purchase machinery for a factory and they owe interest every month. That interest is seen as a cost of doing business and can be deducted against revenues. Interest on a loan is categorized as an interest expense which means you get to deduct 100% of it against income rather than the depreciation expense of 4%. As an aside, when you go to sell and it turns out your rental property went up in value but you depreciated the entire thing. You will have to pay tax on the “recapture” of the depreciation. So you’re effectively deferring the tax burden to a later date, but it will still come (assuming the property goes up in value when you go to sell). Interest expenses are one and done, no recapture.

All of this jargon might be a bit confusing so lets take a look at a quick example. You purchase a home for $700,000 including lawyer fees and renovations and you rent it out for $3000/month. In the first year you would have access to 2% depreciation due to something called the half year rule. The year in which you make a capital expenditure is treated as if you purchased that property halfway through the year, thus giving you half the depreciation for the first year. This means that you can depreciate the rental property 2% in year 1 and 4% in the following years. So 2% of $700,000 is $14,000. Your total rental income is $3000 * 12 = $36,000. At todays mortgage rates of around 5% you would end up paying approximately $32,000 in interest on the mortgage in that first year (assuming you purchased January 1). So what you would do is deduct the interest first leaving you with revenues of $4,000. Then you would apply $4,000 of the available depreciation making your net income before taxes a big fat ZERO.

So what you effectively managed to do here is make an income from your rental property, and you found a way to pay zero tax on it. Over time the property will appreciate and when you go to sell you will owe capital gains tax since it’s a rental. Eventually the interest expense on your mortgage will shrink and the amount that you can depreciate the property will shrink and you will owe tax on the rental income. But in 25 years or so, you will own a completely paid off asset, that is generating you monthly income. With the home equity you’ll be able to take out a line of credit for about 65% of the homes value and do this all over again (or sooner than 25 years from now if it appreciates significantly). I think the best part about all of this that I’m glossing over a bit is that someone else was paying the mortgage and covering all (or most) of the expenses required to operate the home. You are effectively accumulating wealth at double speed assuming you also have a primary residence that you are building home equity in. If you add a third or fourth rental property you can see how this just continually compounds and doesn’t necessarily cost you a lot of money every month to carry the asset. In major cities around the Greater Toronto Area you will most likely face a negative cash flow scenario for the first 5 years or so of owning the property. But maybe somewhat counterintuitively now is a great time to buy a rental property while interest rates are still somewhat high. If you anticipate them dropping in the future, which I do. In 5 years from now when you go to renew your mortgage it’s very likely that your future mortgage payments will be lower than they are today and your rental income will likely be higher, closing the gap of negative cash flow. As another aside, I would recommend talking to an accountant or lawyer if you are going to do a big renovation and want to add it to your homes capital expense bucket because there are certain restrictions to what is or is not considered a capital expense.

We’ve gone over the basics of a simple rental residence that has one or two units. But lets say that you want to venture into the commercial real estate world and purchase a property with more than 6 residential units. What changes? Well the most important thing that changes is that commercial properties are truly treated as standalone businesses. Unlike homes where they are valued based on other homes, commercial properties are valued mostly on the income they are generating (or capitalization rate). Often times people will choose to set up a corporation to hold the property which then means dealing with corporate taxes. The corporate tax rate for small businesses making less than $500,000 is 9% federally and 3.2% in Ontario. Corporate taxation does get somewhat complicated, and as a business owner you can choose to either pay yourself a dividend or pay yourself as an employee, both of which are treated differently under the tax code (speak to an accountant). If you retain the earnings in the business and don’t pay yourself as an employee you will pay the tax rate on the income earned. Similar to the previous example you can deduct costs of running the business, expenses, capital gains, interest expenses, vehicle expenses, etc. all BEFORE you pay tax. This is different from you as an employee in one major way. On your earned salaried income you owe tax immediately and then you get to spend the remainder. Businesses spend first and get taxed later which presents some unique advantages and enables businesses to focus on reinvesting and can grow a business very quickly. Another aside, the rate of depreciation on a commercial property may be different and depending on the type of property the physical land, versus the building that is on the land may be treated differently under the tax code.

The end benefits of operating in a corporate structure is that once you begin to earn taxable income, the tax rates are much lower and it becomes easier to continue to invest within the corporation. You retain more of your earnings within the business which can lead to even faster growth in wealth and there are many more tricks that accountants and lawyers can do to defer your tax burden even further. See estate planning and setting up trusts. If any of this interests you further I would recommend studying the book, Legal, Tax and Accounting Strategies for the Canadian Real Estate Investor by Steven Cohen and George Dube. It was published in 2010, but there are still ton’s of relevant strategies in that book depending on what stage of investing you are in. I do highly recommend simply talking to another real estate investor who has done what you are considering doing as well as an accounting or legal professional as they will be able to best advise you depending on what you are interested in pursuing. It’s very useful to talk to someone who is already doing the thing you want to do because they will have come across many hurdles that you may be able to avoid if you ask the right questions. There are endless layers of depth to this discussion but to avoid an information overload I’ll save it for another time. I hope that between this post and the last post talking about the return on investment (ROI) of rental properties I have got you seriously thinking about the power of real estate investing. You can make it as simple or as complicated as you want and you can even become a developer! (Not for the faint of heart with all the red tape nowadays). Hopefully you found this article interesting or useful and I hope you have an amazing day!

All the best,

Oliver

Post Communism in The Soviet Union and Economic Growth of The Open Market:

If you have read some economic history on the Soviet Union, you’ll know that once the Iron Curtain fell and the market became open, it created a lot of prosperity for those who were in the right positions and had the right connections. Since almost all means of production in Russia were state owned at the time, when the Soviet Union fell there was no clear ownership over the state assets anymore, and the people we now know as Oligarchs were able to make deals with state officials and get some once in a lifetime deals on state assets, obviously laden with corruption of all sorts. The Russian story gets quite detailed with people falling in and out of favour with the government, suspicious deaths of Oligarchs and eventually with Vladimir Putin seizing power. I would recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Russian oligarchs if you’re curious.

While the Russia story is fascinating, I wanted to use this post to talk about some smaller scale success stories that occurred as a result of the transition to a free market in some of the Soviet Union satellite countries. Since I have family in Poland and an uncle who runs a small furniture factory out of an old barn, I thought his story and the story of a few entrepreneurs in this small village of 2000 people would make a great example. After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 and the privatization of the market, it opened opportunities for many people, even small business owners to ride the wave of economic growth that would come. As an example let’s take the story of one family in the village where my mother grew up. The business owner has a very well known story in the village and it is a story of right place right time in his case.

Around the time when the market was opening up and becoming more privatized Greg took out some business loans from multiple banks to purchase land and equipment for his furniture business. Since they were only beginning to regulate open market banking you could shop around at various banks and get each one to lend you a chunk of money for your business. During communism inflation was consistently hitting double digits every month to the point where it hit 1200% in 1990. These two factors set him up for great success with respect to timing. If you have a means of production to make current income at sell goods at current market prices, but your loans were taken out while hyperinflation is happening, you can pay down those loans for pennies on the dollar in a few short months (or groszy on the złoty for my Poles). I’m not entirely sure who would be lending money in an economy with hyperinflation, but I would imagine the lenders tried to protect themselves with very high interest rates or maybe only lend money pegged to a more stable currency. But even interest rates might not be a great defence depending on the severity of the inflation. When there is hyperinflation it’s a very bad time to be a lender and a very good time to be a borrower. So Greg and a few others in the village became significant land owners and business owners and paid next to nothing for it. Now he owns a small shopping mall in the town of Krosno nearby and a vacation home in Spain, so he’s done well for himself. Timing isn’t everything, building a business is not an easy endeavour, but it can help speed things up a bit.

As another example from the same village let’s take my uncle. He was just getting out of school when communism fell. So him and a friend decided to try and start up their own furniture businesses and they worked together to learn all the tricks of the trade required to set up shop. I don’t think he ever expected his business to do as well as it has. At the time he was just trying to find a way to work and make some money. While he didn’t get the very lucky timing of taking out loans while hyperinflation was hitting, he was able to ride a different wave of prosperity. Poland joined the European Union in 2004. This meant free trade and the goal to bring up countries like Poland to higher standards of living. With the free market, the free trade of the EU and the direct financial assistance given to Poland, their economy began to grow. All the while my uncle was selling his furniture to dealers in larger cities and building a network of connections and people who wanted to buy his product. He expanded and bought new equipment and now runs a very sustainable small business.

Poland is now quite “westernized” in it’s standard of living, there is opportunity if you want it, and the big cities are doing quite well and you can find some very well paying jobs in Warsawa. This more advanced stage also introduces multinational corporations who now see a business case to open up stores in the country, for example IKEA. When I had this realization that IKEA might come in and steal all the business from the small furniture manufacturers, I was somewhat concerned for my uncle. But funny enough I actually think something even more interesting has happened. IKEA isn’t exactly known for having top quality materials or amazing variety. What I think has happened is by introducing this new player in the market is it actually elevates my uncles product to a more premium level.

The people who may buy from IKEA to outfit their small apartment in the big city, aren’t necessarily the same people who are staying long term in Poland and are looking for something that is better quality and can be built to order. They serve two completely different markets, and there is space for both of them. Also reflecting back on one of my later blogs about how zoning bylaws in North America don’t encourage small business, the design of a European country is simply more friendly to a wider variety of commerce and smaller businesses in my opinion. Overall, I think there is a more local attitude that still prevails in Europe while in North America we tend to prioritize huge multinational corporations and big box stores.

It is possible that over time things will change, and my uncle will have to find a different way to sell his products. But for now I think his business will continue to grow and serve his market. From a purely economic perspective I find it fascinating how many similar stories there are to his in the soviet satellite countries and Russia itself. Even just within my family’s small village in Poland there are numerous well known entrepreneurs who set up shop around the fall of communism and have expanded their reach to supply stores across the country.

Every once in a while the economy presents a great opportunity to start up a business and in the moment you might not even realize it’s happening. As a recent example, investing in the stock market during COVID. The only thing I wish I did differently was borrow more money to invest with. Hindsight is 20-20 in these situations at there is always risk to borrowing money and you can never really predict what will happen in the future. Our present economy has becoming challenging for a lot of people and if you read the news, there has been news of thousands of tech layoffs in the US. However, many of these employees turn around and start their own companies once they get let go and are finding great success doing so. There is a lot of opportunity available even now, and great sustainable businesses are often built during challenging times. Understanding the past can give you insights into what economic forces were in effect during that moment in time and help improve your radar for understanding when and where the next opportunity might present itself. Communism and COVID are just two of many different examples around the world of global economic shifts that can present great opportunities for people who are ready and able to capitalize on them.

All the best,

Oliver Foote